smello 0.9.0

Capture outgoing HTTP requests and inspect them in a local web dashboard

Smello

Capture HTTP requests, Python logs, and unhandled exceptions from your code and browse them in a local web dashboard.

Like Mailpit, but for your entire debug output.

Setup

Install the client SDK and the server:

pip install smello smello-server

Start the server:

smello-server

Add two lines to your code:

import smello
smello.init(server_url="http://localhost:5110")

import requests
resp = requests.get("https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges")

# Browse captured events at http://localhost:5110

Smello monkey-patches requests, httpx, aiohttp, grpc, and botocore to capture outgoing traffic. It also hooks into sys.excepthook to capture unhandled exceptions with full tracebacks, and optionally into Python's logging module to capture log records.

Or leave smello.init() without arguments and set SMELLO_URL in your environment — no URL, no side effects.

Run without modifying code

For programs you don't want to (or can't) edit, wrap them with smello run:

smello run my_app.py                                    # .py files run with current Python
smello run --server http://localhost:5110 pytest tests/  # console scripts work directly
smello run uvicorn app:app

Smello activates in the wrapped process before user code runs. Subprocess instrumentation propagates automatically through PYTHONPATH, so wrapping gunicorn also captures traffic from worker processes.

CLI flags map 1:1 to the SMELLO_* env vars: --server, --capture-host, --ignore-host, --capture-all / --no-capture-all, --redact-header, --redact-query-param.

Google Cloud libraries

Many Google Cloud Python libraries — BigQuery, Firestore, Pub/Sub, Analytics Data API (GA4), Vertex AI, Speech-to-Text, Vision, Translation, and others — use gRPC under the hood. Smello captures these calls automatically:

import smello
smello.init(server_url="http://localhost:5110")

from google.cloud import bigquery
client = bigquery.Client()
rows = client.query("SELECT 1").result()

# gRPC calls to bigquery.googleapis.com appear at http://localhost:5110

Any library that calls grpc.secure_channel() or grpc.insecure_channel() is automatically captured.

What Smello Captures

HTTP requests — method, URL, headers, body, response status/headers/body, duration, and library used (requests, httpx, aiohttp, grpc, or botocore).

Unhandled exceptions (enabled by default) — exception type, message, full traceback, and stack frames with source context.

Log records (opt-in via capture_logs=True) — level, logger name, message, source location, and extra attributes.

Smello redacts sensitive headers (Authorization, X-Api-Key) by default and optionally redacts query string parameters.

Configuration

smello.init(
    server_url="http://localhost:5110",       # where to send captured data

    # HTTP capture
    capture_hosts=["api.stripe.com"],         # only capture these hosts
    capture_all=True,                          # capture everything (default)
    ignore_hosts=["localhost"],               # skip these hosts
    redact_headers=["Authorization"],         # replace header values with [REDACTED]
    redact_query_params=["api_key", "token"], # replace query param values with [REDACTED]

    # Logs & exceptions
    capture_exceptions=True,                   # capture unhandled exceptions (default)
    capture_logs=False,                        # capture log records (opt-in)
    log_level=30,                              # minimum log level to capture (WARNING)
)

All parameters fall back to SMELLO_* environment variables when not passed explicitly:

Parameter	Env variable	Default
server_url	SMELLO_URL	None (inactive)
capture_all	SMELLO_CAPTURE_ALL	True
capture_hosts	SMELLO_CAPTURE_HOSTS	[]
ignore_hosts	SMELLO_IGNORE_HOSTS	[]
redact_headers	SMELLO_REDACT_HEADERS	["Authorization", "X-Api-Key"]
redact_query_params	SMELLO_REDACT_QUERY_PARAMS	[]
capture_exceptions	SMELLO_CAPTURE_EXCEPTIONS	True
capture_logs	SMELLO_CAPTURE_LOGS	False
log_level	SMELLO_LOG_LEVEL	30 (WARNING)

The server URL is the activation signal — init() does nothing unless server_url is passed or SMELLO_URL is set. Boolean env vars accept true/1/yes and false/0/no (case-insensitive). List env vars are comma-separated.

Supported Libraries

• requests — patches Session.send()
• httpx — patches Client.send() and AsyncClient.send()
• aiohttp — patches ClientSession._request() to capture async HTTP traffic
• grpc — patches insecure_channel() and secure_channel() to intercept unary-unary calls
• botocore — patches URLLib3Session.send() to capture boto3 / AWS SDK traffic

Requires

• Python >= 3.10
• smello-server running locally

Links

• Documentation & Source
• smello-server on PyPI